Florida Man
I’ve lived in Florida my whole life (other than a brief 3 months stint in New Jersey for a work thing). And while this state has many great qualities, and many not so great qualities cough our entire state government especially the Governor *cough, the one constant has always been the heat and humidity. If you live here, you’re used to it of course - the 82 degrees at 5am and how stepping outside any day from late April to early November feels like walking into a bathtub.
But the last few years, to the surprise of no one, climate change has made things much worse. Tampa (where I live) had never before recorded an actual temperature day of 100 degrees or higher, yet we broke that record two years ago, and now it’s fairly common to get days like that, or at least days where the heat index is well into the triple digits. And of course with all this heat, we’ve also had far less rain. You used to be able to almost set your watch to a summer afternoon thunderstorm between 3-5pm but this year at least we’re in a drought without a lot of rain most days. This is unusual because Tampa usually has at least 250 days of rain a year but this year we are tracking far less than that, and far less total rain too.
Then there are hurricanes - 2 years ago Tampa Bay got it’s first direct hit in over 100 years, Hurricane Milton, which was just a few weeks after being grazed by Hurricane Helene. The damage was pretty bad, though it could have been far worse. Florida is just a big ol' strip of land hanging out between the Atlantic Ocean and the ultra hot Gulf of Mexico, but with the rising heat the storms that make it into the Gulf get super charged and can rapidly intensify from a category 1 to a category 4, sometimes in under a day. So yeah, not great.
All of this is to say that, like a typical Florida man, I’m going to ride it out here stubbornly (and maybe stupidly). Florida is home. I can of course hope that it doesn’t get much worse, climate and weather wise (writing this as I’m about to go mow my yard at 8am when the “feels like” is already up to 102 of course).
Visit Florida!